It seems mindless to me to keep on pretending that there are not multiple tens of millions of machines all still running XP and thats a market that could be monetised, instead we see the rather boring cycle of "buy new hardware to support our new bloatware" continuing whilst little new is offered bar a learning curve and less features than before, and they wonder why foks are sitting tight and not wasting their money

If they could spend some time replicating XP wthout swapping stuff about or increasing the resources it would require they would have a world beater as everyone and their dad knows how it works in fine detail and the cost, something folks can no longer say given the "App" mania we are seeing from many parasitic O/S suppliers.

Chrome falls into the bloatware catagory in a big way, no wonder they need more resources, I tried it once saw the carnage and got something decent in to replace it.

It's XP today win7/8 tomorrow, the drip drip of added bloatware necessitating increased computer hardware resources seems to be the path chosen by the industry as a whole, My wish not to pay out good cash on junk I neither want nor can trust is well demonstrated with the so-called latest O/S win10 , as a child it was said to me that a business would not survive if it did not listen to its customers, need I a mere consumer remind a multinational conglomerate of this basic rule of business ?

ha ha, i dont think you could load this page in 64mb of ram, min spec for win 7 looks like 1gb. I get the feeling that with 64mb of ram, xp would be unusable as a daily driver and as you said, f its churning away with a specific legacy task, maybe linux might be the way to go.

My annoyance with all of this is simply one of legacy software, I have (and this is not a made up number) literally thousands of programs that run on Xp and would likely have issues trying to run on any other platform, I would love to simply say I could afford to replace everything I own that runs on XP, but who am I kidding, Xp is just a tool to facilitate the running of those legacy programs, it still puzzles me that bar the credit card industry Microsoft are unwilling to invest anything in ensuring that folks can make use of software that was in the day a major financial investment.

What does the credit card industry have to offer that the consumer market doesn't ? Both still want some level of support but its telling that your not seeing MS strong arm the likes of Visa/Electron etc.

I don't feel chrome is even a major competitor in the browser market so their move away from supporting the older platforms is only to be expected, in the long term they are simply broadcasting the message to the rest of us that they are in things for the short term and when they get bored are more than ready to drop support for their offerings without even a consultation with the userbase, I think that about sums google up.

I remember when i used to use a desktop search engine to go through the code used on the new client to assist in discovering similar code we had already written so we could reuse code by cut and pasting then updating for the specific routine, I was more than a little annoyed when that stopped working and a message about being no longer supported sprang up, Google has a habit of this it seems.

I believe the banks are paying Microsoft almost a billion dollars combined worldwide for more XP updates. Some of the deals just from one country were said to be around 64 Million.

As for Chrome not being a major player in the market, they have the largest market share now, 44.8%. http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php their closest competitor is Safari with 20.7% and then Internet Explorer with 13.7%

My own wifes Mac lost support for Chrome earlier this year requiring us to purchase her a new computer. She was using a 9 year old MacBook Pro so it had quite a good run I think. The chrome situation wasn't the only reason for a new one, her OS wasn't receiving security updates anymore either, the Chrome thing was just the last nail in the coffin. She was very happy to get a new computer. We bought her a brand new 15" Retina MacBook Pro.

One great alternative for people still on XP is Firefox. Also still being updated for older Macs like my wife's old machine. But I would still recommend XP owners to update for the updated security features that XP lacks and will never receive now that it is EOL for consumers.

Those stats are good for showing a trend but they are not accurate in terms of general net usage, the sort of folks visiting either W3 or one of their 32k of affiliated sites are the sort of folks who will predominantly be using up to date machines and browsers, the web development fraternity in fact.

We can agree however that Win7 is the next best thing to XP for those needing some anchor in the sea, I use win7 and XP here along with opera and firefox, everything runs OK for now and whilst i can still get usage out of my good software i shall do so, a deals a deal

I don't do web development or fast gaming, in fact a new machine is just a pain in the gonads as theres little of benefit for me to make the effort, and with the cost of purchasing new software (if you can still get stuff that's useful without a ton of junk tacked on) it actually negates for me the whole purpose, I hate to say this but i have all the power I need and thus purchasing for the sake of it is the last thing on my mind.